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This open access book examines the educational conditions that support cultures of exploration in kindergartens. It conceptualises cultures of exploration, whether those cultures are created through children’s own engagement or are demanded of them through undertaking specific tasks within different institutional settings. It shows how the conditions for children’s exploration form a web of activities in different settings with social relationships, local landscapes and artefacts. The book builds on the understanding of cultural traditions as deeply implicated in the developmental processes, meaning that local considerations must be reflected in education for sustainable futures. Therefore the book examines and conceptualises exploration and cultural formation through locally situated cases and navigates toward global educational concepts. The book provides different windows into how children may explore in everyday practice settings in kindergarten, and contributes to a loci-based, ecological, integral knowledge relevant for early childhood education.
This book uses Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory to provide a unique theorisation of teachers’ professional development as a practice. A practice can be described as the socially structured actions set up to produce a product or service aimed at meeting a collective human need. In this case, collaborative, interventionist work with teachers in two different Australian primary schools sought to simultaneously identify, understand and develop the necessary conditions for supporting the teachers’ development as professionals. The in-depth analysis of this practice provides interesting insight into professional development for teachers at all levels of schooling, and provides strong su...
The cultural-historical approach started in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, who held that learning and instruction are the means to development, is the foundation for the Radical-Local Theory of Teaching and Learning formulated by Mariane Hedegaard and Seth Chaiklin in the first part of the book. The central concern in this approach to education is how to integrate particular historical and cultural conditions that the children encounter into educational practices. The second half of the book is an extensive case study of an after-school programme for Puerto Rican primary students in East Harlem, New York conducted in a radical-local perspective. This programme focussed on the history of the comm...
This international handbook gives a comprehensive overview of findings from longstanding and contemporary research, theory, and practices in early childhood education in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The first volume of the handbook addresses theory, methodology, and the research activities and research needs of particular regions. The second volume examines in detail innovations and longstanding programs, curriculum and assessment, and conceptions and research into child, family and communities. The two volumes of this handbook address the current theory, methodologies and research needs of specific countries and provide insight into existing global similarities in early childhood practices. By paying special attention to what is happening in the larger world contexts, the volumes provide a representative overview of early childhood education practices and research, and redress the current North-South imbalance of published work on the subject.
This book introduces current theories and research on disability, and builds on the premise that disability has to be understood from the dialectical dynamics of biology, psychology, and culture over time. Based on the newest empirical research on children with disabilities, the book overcomes the limitations of the medical and social models of disability by arguing for a dialectical biopsychosocial model. The proposed model builds on Vygotsky’s cultural-historical ideas of developmental incongruence, implying that the disability emerges from the misfit between individual abilities and the cultural-historical activity settings in which the child with impairments participates. The book is a...
This book offers an up-to-date review of our current understanding of climate change in the North Sea and adjacent areas, as well as its impact on ecosystems and socio-economic sectors. It provides a detailed assessment of climate change based on published scientific work compiled by independent international experts from climate-related disciplines such as oceanography, atmospheric sciences, marine and terrestrial ecology, using a regional evaluation and review process similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of our changing climate, discussing a wide range of topics including past, current and future climate change, and climate-related changes in marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. It also explores the impact of climate change on socio-economic sectors such as fisheries, agriculture, coastal zone management, coastal protection, urban climate, recreation/tourism, offshore activities/energy, and air pollution.
This collection of papers examines key ideas in cultural-historical approaches to children’s learning and development and the cultural and institutional conditions in which they occur. The collection is given coherence by a focus on the intellectual contributions made by Professor Mariane Hedegaard to understandings of children’s learning through the prism of the interplay of society, institution and person. She has significantly shaped the field through her scholarly consideration of foundational concepts and her creative attention to the fields of activity she studies. The book brings together examples of how these concepts have been employed and developed in a study of learning and development. The collection allows the contributing scholars to reveal their reactions to Hedegaard’s contributions in discussions of their own work in the field of children’s learning and the conditions in which it occurs.
This book has one explicit purpose: to present a new theory of cultural learning in organisations which combines practice-based learning with cultural models - a cognitive anthropological schema theory of taken-for-granted connections - tied to the everyday meaningful use of artefacts. The understanding of culture as emerging in a process of learning open up for new understandings, which is useful for researchers, practitioners and students interested in dynamic studies of culture and cultural studies of organisations. The new approach goes beyond culture as a static, essentialist entity and open for our possibility to learn in organisations across national cultures, across ethnicity and across the apparently insurmountable local educational differences which makes it difficult for people to communicate working together in an increasingly globalized world. The empirical examples are mainly drawn from organisations of education and science which are melting-pots of cultural encounters.
This Open Access book examines children’s participation in dialectical reciprocity with place-based institutional practices by presenting empirical research from Australia, Brazil, China, Poland, Norway and Wales. Underpinned by cultural-historical theory, the analysis reveals how outdoors and nature form unique conditions for children's play, formal and informal learning and cultural formation. The analysis also surfaces how inequalities exist in societies and communities, which often limit and constrain families' and children's access to and participation in outdoor spaces and nature. The findings highlight how institutional practices are shaped by pedagogical content, teachers' training, institutional regulations and societal perceptions of nature, children and suitable, sustainable education for young children. Due to crises, such as climate change and the recent pandemic, specific focus on the outdoors and nature in cultural formation is timely for the cultural-historical theoretical tradition. In doing so, the book provides empirical and theoretical support for policy makers, researchers, educators and families to enhance, increase and sustain outdoor and nature education.